How linking Alexa devices to the Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, or Fire TV Edition television works

It has long been one of the most requested features, but Alexa devices like the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot can now finally be used to control the Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, and Fire TV Edition television. If you have multiple Alexa devices and/or multiple Fire TV devices, things have the potential to get a little confusing, so Amazon has created a linking process that allows you to assign specific Alexa devices to specific Fire TV devices. Here’s what that process looks like and how it works.

For starters, if you have only one Fire TV device associated with your Amazon account, it should just work automatically without needing to link anything. If it doesn’t, or if you have multiple Fire TV devices, you’ll need to configure a few things in the Alexa app.

When you launch the Alexa app, you need to press the menu button in the top left corner and select the “Music, Video, & Books” option at the top. Once in the media menu, you need to select the “fire TV” option under the “Video” section. Then just select the blue “Link your Alexa device” option.

Once that’s done, you’ll be presented with a list of all the Fire TVs, Fire TV Sticks, and Fire TV Edition televisions associated with your Amazon account. Select the one you want to configure. You’ll be able to configure additional Fire TV devices later. My list above might look weird, but that’s just because I have so many Fire TV devices for testing that I’ve given them numbers as names to keep track of them. See here to learn how to change the names of your Fire TV devices to identify them easily.

After selecting the Fire TV device you want to configure, you’ll be shown a list of all of your Alexa devices. Here you select the Alexa devices that you want to be able to control the Fire TV that was just chosen. Alexa devices that can control Fire TVs include the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show, Echo Look, Amazon Tap, Dash Wand, and some 3rd-party devices.

You can assign multiple Alexa devices to control a single Fire TV, however, each Alexa device can only be assigned to a single Fire TV. When you go in to configure another Fire TV device, the Alexa device’s you’ve previously assigned to a Fire TV device will not be available to select from your list of Alexa devices.

It would be great to be able to specify which Fire TV device you want to be controlled on the fly with your voice command, but that ability is not available. Meaning, you cannot add “…on my bedroom Fire TV” to the end of a command to specify which Fire TV is controlled. Once you assign an Alexa device to a specific Fire TV, that one Fire TV is the only one it can control.

Thankfully though, the pairing is not one-to-one in both directions. Multiple Alexa devices can control the same Fire TV, so you would obviously want to assign an Alexa device to control a Fire TV that is in the same room, but you can assign all Alexa devices that are not in a room with a TV to control your main Fire TV.

32 comments

Going off other delayed releases, it will be at least 6 months from now before the UK sees it. Still waiting for drop in activation here.

To be honest, I am really losing the love for my echos. Apart from asking the time(!) and for music, I just don’t use it. In fact, the music request becomes so frustrating as it mis-hears and plain gets it wrong most of the time that I end up using my PC to send to my sonos.

I definitely won’t be buying any more and will possibly jump ship to google once they have been in the wild a little longer with some genuine reviews.

I agree and hardly use my dots for anything other than switching things on and off and the weather, plus the odd bit of music to my receiver which is not a 100% functional experience. What I don’t get is that devices like the Dot, Harmony and FireTV are identical hardware in the US and U.K. so why the delay in rolling out software?

Gotta agree. While I still use my echo dot daily to listen to my flash briefing and play some music, seeing numerous articles online (not just on this site) about “Check THIS out on Alexa”, then going to try it and finding it unavailable is getting beyond grating.

The times when the feature has become available in the Alexa App, but yet doesn’t work because you’re not in the US, is yet another annoyance.

At least giving some indication or roadmap of when features may become available in other territories would be nice.

Here is Amazon’s help page for it, but unfortunately, even it does not have a full list of available commands. For example, it doesn’t list “Alexa, go home” as a command, which does work for the Fire TV.

Thanks! I was able to pause a movie from Amazon Video, but nothing I tried made it start again. I tried “unpause”, “play”, “restart Amazon Video”. I even added in the title of the movie to the command and nothing worked.

Thanks! You nailed it. “Resume Fire TV” is the correct command. It’s too bad the official Amazon reference is so poorly conceived. They list both “play” and “resume”. When I said “play”, Alexa responded in an odd way. I wish someone would create an accurate and complete list of commands and continue supplementing that list as new features are added.

I don’t see my Fire TVs in the video section. Tried updating the app, logged in from my desktop, checked for updates on my FireTV and still nada. Only thing I can think of is they are either still rolling out updates or because I use it in Canada (US address and US account) it’s somehow not available for me.

My fire tv is the only thing not showing up! For some reason all my old fire sticks are showing up and they’re not even plugged in to anything. Tell me how that works?! How can I get my fire tv to show up in the list of fire tv to add?

1- doesn’t work in older ROMs , I have 3 fire TV’s and even though I could link all three in the Alexa app ,the commands only worked on the one that I had recently updated .

2- any app sideloaded that doesn’t exist in the official Amazon app store will not open ..so yes no ‘open Kodi’ command.

3- opening apps worked perfectly and once playing a video rewind x minutes , fastward x minutes , pause and upaused worked fine in most apps .

3- play a video automatically only works if the video exist in Amazon prime video for example play the man in the high castle ..however if you ask play the man in the high Castle season 2 episode 3 this doesn’t work ..just open man in the high Castle , if you have Netflix installed and ask Alexa to play orange is the New Black from Netflix on the fire TV will only bring you to a page where you can click on watch now on fire TV (Google home still beats Alexa here )
There was no way to get anything to play on Netflix or HBO go or any other app directly which sucks .

4- music apps were not able to play music on fire TV for example Spotify .

In conclusion, at this point this is just nice to open the app and help you pause fast forward, rewind and unpause but you will still need your controller.. not worth updating my two fire tvs that have Kodi as the home screen …

I was under the impression you could use the echo to control fire TV so purchased them both together. This isn’t communicated very well! Do we get a discount in the UK seeing as we don’t get the same functionality! I’m thinking of taking it back! It’s the reason I bought both items….I’ve contacted Amazon so I’ll be interested to see their response. Not happy!

Thought it was me just not being great with gadgets! Have been trying to link echo dot to fire stick and getting very frustrated. I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t on the app. Now I know……not possible in UK. That’s not good

Found a solution for you guys. It works fine for me. Configure your country address to a US address from Amazon.com > your account> account settings > content and devices > settings > country settings. Make sure your streaming keeps working.

Hi all.
Same problem here in Austria, no film in the menu. Music & Books.
Had a long talk with Amazon and also recieved a follow-up email.
Here the short info, known problem,software is ready and waiting on legal issues to roll it out.
Seeing that you in the UK are having the same issue, perhaps it’s a Amazo vs Eu thing.
If so, you all took the right direction ;-)
Trying to connect an Echo Plus to a Fire TV stick
Saw the suggest work around of changing the address in locations, but hesitant to try that.
AMAZON PRIME customers here and don’t want to mess that up.
Any one try that, locatio change with PRIME account?

I came across this article trying to figure out how to connect my fire stick to my Echo. Alexa can’t see the fire stick. But according to this article the Echo can hook up to Fire TV devices “under your account”.

Now, the fire stick we have, I got for my wife last Christmas and set it up so she can watch shows on it and such. The Echo was a gift to me this past Christmas. But since I don’t have Amazon Prime or anything special with my account, it seems like I can’t connect the FireStick?

Now this is strange to me since I have Pandora hooked up through the echo and the Pandora account belongs to my wife, not me.

My Dot isn’t finding the Fire TV Stick. It stated that if your stick isn’t associated with the Dot account you may need to reconfigure things but doesn’t say how. The dot is listed under my Amazon account while the fire stick is under my husbands. Does it matter? Should I just re-register the dot under his account?

In answer to your question, here is what I’m facing. We have an Echo Plus and a Fire TV stick. they are both registered to the same Amazon Prime account. They both show in the Alexa app on my tablet in the Device area. What is missing is the Video, Music & Books menu, ours shows only Music & Books, thus with the failing Video part of the menu, we don’t get to the linking menu.
As I mentioned in my post above, I had a long telephone talk with Amazon and a fallow-up email.
We were informed that here in Austria, Amazon is waiting on a legal issue and as soon as that is settled they, Amazon, will push a software update out.
I got this information from the Help menu in the Alexa app where one can make a telephone contact. I was very surprise how quickly it worked. About 15 seconds seconds after putting my contact info into the form in the contact menu and clicking the send button my phone rang.
Hope that this information helps, in that I too spent hours trying to link the two before I went the official help direction. Now I am in the waiting mode.
You can try putting both devices on the same account, and I think you should, but form reading the other entries here, if you are in the UK it might not solve your problem. If you are in the USA or Canada then it should work out of the box and your problem may well be only the separate accounts.
Good Luck.

An add on to my last post. It appears that this same linking problem exist also in Canada.
Here in Austria it is still the same. No Video listed in the menu, thus no possible way to link Echo Plus and Fire TV Stick.
The Fire TV stick is running Netflix and Amazon Prime video, the Alexa remote control also works, just no link between the two Amazon devices

the issue I’m having is my Alexa deice responds correctly like its working but nothing happens on the fire stick… I have linked the firestick to the Alexa in the livingroom. also I only have the one firestick so I know I didn’t choose the wrong one. any help would be awesome.. thanks